Wait for the Lord;
be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the Lord!
(Ps 27:14)

O God, that at all times you may find me
as you desire me
and where you would have me be,
that you may lay hold on me fully —
both by the Within and the Without of myself —
grant that I may never break this double thread of my life.

– Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Divine Milieu

I have often prayed this beautiful prayer from The Divine Milieu. As lovely as the above translation is, however, there may be a more accurate way to render one phrase. The original French doesn’t quite ask God to find me “where you would have me be.” Rather, it begs that God may find me “there where you are waiting for me” (là où vous m’attendez).

Not only do we wait for God, but God is also waiting for us.

God may be waiting for us in a particular place or in a particular way of being to which we are called. But at the same time, God is already with us and near us, waiting for us in the closeness of our own hearts, waiting for us to say yes. “Yes, my God, I do want to be one with you in your love. I want to share your life.”

We both wait and are waited for. We wait, we seek, we long for God, we take whatever steps toward God that we know to take. And there we find, paradoxically, that God has been waiting for us and longing for us. At the same time, God has been with us all along, for without the divine presence in us, we would not be able to long for God, nor would we be able to take even a single step toward God.

So we pray in Advent (and at other times, too), “Come, Lord Jesus.” And perhaps we hear God calling to us, “Come. I am waiting for you.”

Here are two quotations on the presence of the Holy Spirit when we pray, the first from Paul’s letter to the Romans:

The Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.

(Romans 8:26)

The second is from Karl Rahner, on the beauty and dignity of our prayer:

The Spirit is a helper in our prayer… Because [the Spirit] helps, our prayer is a piece of the melody that rushes through the heavens, an aroma of incense that sweetly rises to the eternal altars of heaven before the triune God. The Spirit of God prays in us. That is the holiest consolation in our prayer. The Spirit of God prays in us. That is the most exalted dignity of our prayer.

God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good.
(Genesis 1:31)

“It was very good.” All creatures are good and valued, including ourselves who are made, amazingly enough, in the divine image.

We are
told that God’s “compassion is over all that he has made” (Psalm
145:9). As we live and love from the life of the One in whose image we
are made, we too have compassion for the creation God proclaimed good.

Full of the unexpected, Easter makes love real and concrete. Perhaps
no place are the lessons of love more tangibly present than in the
Easter events.

After the Resurrection, those gathered in the Upper Room—the
Cenacle—locked themselves into the room in which they had shared the
Last Supper with Jesus. They did not expect him to walk through those
locked doors and give them the gift of peace. They did not expect that,
but they did experience it. Neither did any of them anticipate that when
they did not know what else to do—and so did what they knew, i.e., go
fishing—Jesus would walk over water, join them and cook their breakfast
with the fish they caught.

Jesus taught Peter, who had denied Jesus, to recognize and claim his
love and forgiveness. Indeed he taught Peter to say, “You (Jesus) know I
love you.” Easter invites us too to realize the power of his love and learn to
receive it. May we also recognize and receive his very personal love for each
of us, and hear the call to share it.

Easter also teaches us to rejoice. It is a feast that celebrates life and
joy. Imagine, for example, what Mary Magdalene must have felt when Jesus
called her by name. In the recognition she experienced she knew the
kind of freedom that does not need to hang on (see John 20). Freed from any clinging,
then, she was freed to do as he asked. Joy awakens the inner freedom
that loves because of the other’s joy.

Loving Silence,
Beauty, source of all loveliness,
All-Desirable One,
have mercy on us.

O Crucified One,
have mercy on us.

__________

"The Cross of Christ is the penetration of God into that unholy area where we would least expect him and, if the truth be known, where we least want him. God has entered into the loneliness of our suffering and the self-hatred of our sin. And he has not come as judgment but as acceptance. The Cross is the communication of God’s care but it is not a message from the outside. God loves us by receiving our lives into himself as we experience them — torn and broken. The Cross is God loving us from the inside."

As young children who felt Lent needed to be made interesting – and not just like a punishment— my classmates:

• went to the priest who gave the biggest, darkest cross of ashes;

• did not eat candy but did save every bite that came their way;

• went to the Stations ceremony during school rather than after;

• and competed to win the “I gave the most” alms contest.

The Church still calls us to Lenten prayer, fasting, and almsgiving — but not to win contests or prove how good we are.

So we ask ourselves:
Why then are we invited to these practices? What do they give us? How do they make us more aware of the Christ who redeems us and whose love is shot through our lives?

These are indeed questions for pondering.

I will sprinkle clean water upon you,
and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses,
and from all your idols I will cleanse you.
A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you;
and I will remove from your body the heart of stone
and give you a heart of flesh.
I will put my spirit within you…
(Ezekiel 36:25-27a)

Forgiveness is not a sign of weakness, as we human beings tend to
think. God, we learn, expresses divine power not by getting even with
us when we do wrong, but by forgiving us: “[You] manifest your almighty
power above all by pardoning and showing mercy” (Collect, 26th Sunday in
Ordinary Time).

What about us? How do we live out of the divine mercy poured out on us? How do we witness to the divine life dwelling in us?

Do you not know
that you are God’s temple
and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?
(1 Cor 3:16).

One of the most important ways is to show
mercy — to live out of the merciful love which we cannot claim to
merit. And we remind ourselves — in our weakness, in our reluctance to
forgive — that we are always wrapped in the tender and merciful love of
God.